(a lunar tune) — Text and Commentary
written by v ness (2020)
“I’m not interested really in talking to you as an artist. It seems to me that the artist’s struggle for [their] integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for the struggle (which is universal and daily) of all human beings on the face of this globe to get to become human beings. It is not your fault, it is not my fault, that I write. And I never would come before you in the position of a complainant for doing something that I must do… The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets. That’s my first proposition. We know about the Oedipus Complex not because of Freud, but because of a poet who lived in Greece thousands of years ago. And what he said then about what it was like to be alive is still true in spite of the fact that we can now get to Greece in a matter of five hours and then it would have taken I don’t know how long a time.”
— James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” (1962)
Supposing we could just go on and on as two
voracious in the days apart as well as when
we side by side (the many ways we do
that) well! I would consider then
perfection possible, or else worthwhile
to think about. Which is to say
I guess the costs of long term tend to pile
up, block and complicate, erase away
the accidental, temporary, near
thing/pulsebeat promises one makes
because the chance, the easy new, is there
in front of you. But still, perfection takes
some sacrifice of falling stars for rare.
And there are stars, but none of you, to spare.
— June Jordan, “Sunflower Sonnet Number Two”
— —
INTRODUCTION
— —
First and foremost, this poem is actually a sequel.
But I’ll get to that in a bit. This summer I was asked to take part in the Coming To Know digital discourse program that was accompanying A Slightly Curving Place, an exhibit at the Haus de Kulteren der Welt in Berlin on Umashankar Manthravadi’s work as a self-taught acoustic archaeologist. I was asked to respond to one of the three nodes that he developed around his work: Digging, Recording, and Tuning. I chose tuning, because there were already some ideas in the back of my mind of exploring tuning as a lunar node. I was asked by Brooke Holmes to take part in the exhibit, and I later learned that each respondent in the digital discourse program was connected to either Brooke or Nida Ghouse in some way. I’d only known Brooke for a short period of time and yet the threads of our relationship were beginning to have an interesting resonance, and I thought back to the first time I had heard her speak of India and acoustic archaeology:
It was at a talk she gave in New York City in February on Cy Twombly and his Homeric paintings. I had attended it in part because I loved Twombly’s Leda and the Swan, and I was curious to hear more about his classical reception — particularly from a scholar whose work I was only just beginning to become interested in. I had attended the talk with one of my best friends, and I asked a question about the acoustics of space and architecture, which led Brooke to referencing Manthravadi’s work in her reply.
This poem is actually a sequel.
I brought one of my best friends to this talk because they were visiting me for their birthday. Their 27th birthday, to be precise. I had been making a lot of that shift — 2020 was the year that I and all of my fellow ’93 friends were turning 27, which felt like a shift to me — three to the third power. This best friend in particular (I have three, speaking of power in triplicate) always laughed at my antics — because wasn’t everything always shifting in one way or another?
Yet I find it fascinating that it was in February around that friend’s birthday that I first heard about Manthravadi’s work, and then in September, around my 27th birthday, I would have my museum debut performing a poem that I wrote inspired by his own methodologies. Not to mention everything that would happen between February and September this year. Furthermore, I wrote the poem about the friend that I brought to this talk where I first heard of Manthravadi.
(Because this poem is actually a sequel)
So in order to understand this poem — which was composed for a tuning group as a part of a museum — you really have to understand my history with muses/musings and tunes/tunings, and how those concepts are inextricable from friendship in my mind.
It began with my first best friend, Annelise. We grew up together, both playing stringed instruments — her the viola, I the harp — and we’d bond over our respective orchestral experiences. She was also one of my first muses — I would also talk to her on the phone, for hours on end, about different stories I was writing, and novels I was coming up with, inspired by our lives, but also by her in so many different ways.
And then there’s my most recent best friend, Corey. We worked at a coffee shop together in a town called Olympia and he got me back into rhythm after I’d become musically disenchanted from my stint studying Romanticism and the harp in undergrad. He’s a professional folk musician who plays a whole host of stringed instruments, but is probably best known for the banjo. Watching him perform, I felt the need to rise to the occasion and start composing song lyrics for the first time since some errant attempts when I was in high school. He inspired the first song I ever wrote about classical myth, which was a riff on the play Orestes by Euripides.
Finally, coming from the boundaries of my best friends, I have to return to the middle, to the one who comes in between them, to Forever. They only recently started playing a stringed instrument, the mandolin (and their only prior musical experience was with a trumpet and clarinet). So much of this poem is inspired by the conversations I’ve had with them about tuning a stringed instrument, and what a unique experience that is (particularly compared to horns and woodwinds). I’ve only become more attuned to this notion since the summer of 2019 — when I spent a week in Tarquinia building and studying my own ancient lyre —of all of the ancient ideas around that stringed instrument being its own embodied form that a musician must respect and come into consonance with. But as I keep incessantly repeating:
This poem is actually a sequel.
Specifically, it’s a sequel to a poem I wrote for Forever who — at the beginning of our friendship — would frequently go out to slam poetry nights in Olympia, and after a while I would begin to tag along. It was a style of performance that I was not accustomed to, especially growing up with Annelise in the symphonies of orchestra and the dramas of theatre. But I loved it. I had never thought about performing poetry even though I had written so much over the years. And after a time, I wanted to thank Forever for introducing me to a new form of expression. But I also didn’t want to imitate their style of poetry, so I realized that I had to figure out something different, something hybrid, something a little mixed up and confusing — but something that would get there in the end to express how I felt (not only about the performance of poetry, but also our entire relationship that was blossoming from roommates into something deeper and more sustainable).
I was actually inspired by Anne Carson’s Nox, where she does a style of translation-poetry in order to mourn her brother. In lieu of epitaph, I wanted to flip it into a sort of fiddling fragmented love elegy. The poem was titled “SAPPHO FRAGMENT #45 (with an addendum)” because I added the modern Greek for “forever” after those three Aeolic words. I translated from ancient to modern, fiddling with each form and using it as a synecdoche for my status as roommate with Forever slowly blossoming into friendship that wouldn’t have to be sustained by the capitalist constructs of housing we were living under, but would instead metaphysics itself into something more cosmic.
However this was early 2016. I had only been studying ancient Greek for a little over a year at that point. Sappho 45 suited my purposes because it was a short fragment. However, if I had been more confident in my ability to play with the Greek, I would have vastly preferred to have used Sappho 34.
(It was mainly because of the nickname Forever and I garnered at the coffee shop that I would later work at with Corey — Moon and Stars. The former because it was Forever’s last name, the latter because it’s one of the proposed definitions of my own first name, in the tradition of Jonathan Swift. Sappho 34 is a poem I immediately started associating with Forever soon after we started living together as roommates.)
And ever since 2016, I’ve always wanted to write a poem using Sappho 34 where I felt I’ve done it justice to the heart and inspiration that brought about “SAPPHO FRAGMENT #45 (with an addendum)” because as I say in one of my fragments:
Fine-tuning a tune divine takes time. Fine.
And that’s why this poem ends with Sappho 34, hanging right under the Mesê string, bringing everything to the middle and to a close. It’s a final epode I wanted to give to the concepts around musings and tunings — that even I, as those fixed cosmic stars that dictate so much of human life and ideology, pull back on myself whenever my muses or tunes are glowing bright. I’ve learned that through all three of my best friends, but particularly the one who shares a name with the moon.
It’s why the first part of this poem is an epic cosmogony from the stars’ perspective of the sublunary region, then the second half are elegiac lyric fragments reflecting different phases of the moon in all of its personal meanings to me. How else could I make my debut in a museum — literally a place of musings — in a session on tuning without talking about the ones who’ve gotten me so amused and attuned over the years?
And I have to stress the interpersonal here — not just because I was a part of an exhibit where we were all coming together because of disparate interpersonal relationships, but also because these close relationships have deeply impacted how I engage with the past. Not just in thinking through music, empathy, voice, and performance! My best friends are formidable scholars, researchers, educators, journalists, and activists in very separate fields from my own. Their ways of thinking have deeply informed my own as an interdisciplinary scholar who is constantly having to try to listen to voices from the past.
That’s also why I start with Plutarch. He flips the script of our own conceptions of the Delphians so elegantly while at the same time situating everything cosmic into a triptych. I work well in triplicate, as I’m sure I’ve demonstrated. I was hoping to also flip the script while thinking of the core of the Coming to Know program, of listening to the past. As Brooke and Nida say:
“In proposing this kind of listening as a modality for perceiving the past, we set aside the visual techniques of knowledge historically deployed by the archaeological site, the museum, and the project of colonial modernity to possess the past as an object of timeless value capable of legitimating the present. We also set aside the public program as a didactic supplement to an alien, premodern place and time. Our aim instead is to ask how the process of coming to know a premodern past together transforms our sense of the knowledge held in common.”
And so I realized that in order to honor Umashankar Manthravadi’s work in acoustic archaeology — I had to listen to not only the things that had attuned and amused me, but the ways in which I felt we were all mused and tuned. I realized that I had to express — in the word limit I had — a cosmos in microcosm, which is when I had to condense it into some sort of poetic form.
The result is the text. A poem as a sequel when I have no intention of providing the original. A performance that I embodied fully in the digital discourse program, with the disembodied prequel echoing in my head in the background.
Yet my own strange messy middling poem ended up resonating, thanks to my boundary strings (or nodes) on the tuning panel — Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Phiroze Vasunia. Their respective works on tuning into disembodied voices over the radio and analysis of the impact of music “tuning” a body in medical texts allowed me to slip in between to create a literal harmony. And so I have to thank Tapati and Phiroze (as well as Brooke and Nida for getting us aligned with each other in the first place) for creating such wondrous symphony with me.
As I’ve repeated I’m sure to the point of irritation at this point: This poem is actually a sequel. And as the three of us proved on that panel — it is through the blending, not the dichotomizing, of embodied and disembodied voices that truly attuned harmonies arise.
— —
TEXT
— —
(a lunar tune)
written by v ness (2020)Plutarch says…
For [the Delphians] tell us that it is not from notes of voice or string that the Muses have been given the names they have there. Rather the whole cosmos is divided into three regions: the first is that of the fixed stars, the second that of the planets, and the last the sublunary region; they are all knit and ordered together in harmonious formulae; and each has its guardian Muse, the first region Hypatê, the lowest Neätê, and the intermediate Mesê, who holds together and intertwines, so far as is feasible, things mortal and divine, terrestrial and heavenly.
Hypatê “High”
(musing tunings)Out of inky electric heights
Twinkly flickering stars of night
Watch the drama down beneath
From their cushy velvet seats
The messy middle of it all
Making everyone big and small
Undying wanderers through the years
Waltzing ‘round their celestial spheres.
A star is central — we would know —
And that golden one’s putting on quite the show
Blazing beaming scorching drying
Stretching straining baking lying
Lead wanderer — bright enough to see
That she got the others in harmony
They followed each gilt step she’d tread
Like Ariadne of the golden thread
Leading her chorus through void and plasma
Twirling through all of the cosmic miasma
Yet the warming preservation of her brilliant heat
Would take a step back (more than a couple of feet)
To the swooning pas de deux playing out across a triptych
Between gravity and liquid in the sublunary ecliptic —
The bodacious moon had tidally locked onto the swelling sea
Turning their back to take the brunt of all celestial debris
They’re always changing faces, rather fixated on the tide
Til every being on that earth felt liquid rhythm deep inside
They started rolling out of ocean and lapping up the land
They started dribbling down the mountains and seeping through the sand
Now even fixed-fixated stars had queries twinkling up inside:
What did deep sea creatures feel of long-embedded lunar tides?
What impact could solid beings understand beyond their scars?
How could they even fathom what was used to make up stars?
Yet the ocean’s roaring soundscape after billions of years?
Has been the natural music of the lunar tuning spheres.
A step out of rhythm — just off of the sun —
Of water stretching — then rolling back to one —
Now here’s where the understanding gets a little bit tricky —
See, water in actuality is really quite sticky
The moon tunes that stickiness into a form
Eventually changing it into some sort of norm
So while the sun electrified that azure wanderer at its poles
The moon tuned a rhythm into those liquid creatures’ souls.Let’s read between the lines
To see the narrative
And try to tease out each
Subtle imperative.An untold story:
How the moon
Got a liar
Into tune.Neätê “Low”
(tuning musings)I. New Moon
Take a look without the light
See that void against the height
Even without shining bright
Influential in their flight
Calling for you in the night
Stretching like a gut string tight:
Feel the moon without your sightII. Waxing Crescent
Beach combing
Edge combing
Beach edges
Unbleached edges
Bleached sea shells
That she sells
A Salish Salacia sees
A Kentucky Blue Hecatease.III. First Quarter
Things breezy cool and blithe
Like a boomeranging scythe
Reality checking out of life
Hilarity of endless strife.
Riding high
Voices low
Dripping bodies
To and fro
Water-watching
Endless flow
Catch an eye
And here we go.IV. Waxing Gibbous
Crack a smile
Mesê found
For a while
Common ground
Harmonize
Our own sound
In the lies
Truth abound
Fine tuning
A tune divine
Takes time.
Fine.V. Full Moon
So sick of Nietzschean tantric
From those earnest sychophantics
(Veil of Isis, how Romantic)
Just performin’ cuz they frantic
Thinkin ‘bout our mid-Atlantics
(plus more suicidal antics)
When they’d rather be pedantic
Than to feel out the semantics
(Apollonian hierophantics)
Chemically making you bacchantic
Towards the shades of Negromantic
(Flowing through Nch’i-Wàna and Styx — )VI. Waning Gibbous
Loosen the string
It’s too sharp
You need it lower
On this harp.Tighten back up —
Annnnd it’s flat.
But notice how
It makes a scat.VII. Last Quarter
The sea ain’t got its own back door
Say what you are, and nothing more
Soak it up in every pore
Always know what you’re here for.VIII. Waning Crescent
Words dripping
Slipping
Back and forth
Drenching
Clenching
South and north
Tuning
Luning
Mooning
Crooning
Spooning lumps of sugar sphinx
Into capitalist subtle-tea
Trying to feel out and fathom together
Just what’ll be.
The two-faced creative blind-spot of memory
Like Ariadne embedded in Naxos emeryIX. New Moon (again).
Know now through these last epodes
Fixed, mutable, card’nal modes
Humming down the starlit roads
Bearing dripping liquid lodes
Ever-braided with our codes
Uttered first in ancient odes:
Tuning’s born of lunar nodes.Mesê “Middle”
(amused and attuned — a gold or silver string?)Sappho says…
The stars around their blooming moon
Slip back their luminescing form whenever
In her fullness her light pours forth on
The earth(silvery)
— —
COMMENTARY
— —
A-Flat. A. A-Sharp.
C. F. G. C.
Suppose my music is a hyper-
homicidal harp
and I’m just playing
— excerpt of “Adrienne’s Poem: On the Dialectics of the Diatonic Scale” by June Jordan
— —
Regarding Plutarch: I began with this quote because I first became interested with it when crafting a lyre in Tarquinia the summer before COVID. I was already feeling out of sorts with the emphasis Apollo is given in ancient music (a similar distaste I’d had with Nietzsche, which brought me to the field of classical studies in the first place — but I’ll get to that later), especially after soaking myself in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Yet crafting a lyre, I couldn’t deny that the sun was important — liquid is ruinous to stringed instruments.
I was first brought to all of this fixation on the string Mesê by studying under John Franklin at Euterpe music school, building the lyre. I was also drawn to Nicomachus’ notions of the harmony of the spheres, and his equating the seven epicentric strings of the lyre to the seven wanderers in the sky — Selene/Moon for Netê, Aphrodite (Venus) for Paranetê, Hermes (Mercury) for Paramesê, Helios/Sun for Mesê, Ares (Mars) for Lichanos (or Hypermesê), Zeus (Jupiter) for Parypatê, and Kronos (Saturn)/Fixed Stars for Hypatê.
I thought there was an interesting resonance here with Plutarch’s quote about the Delphian’s and their cosmic trio of muses (especially for them since Mesê was supposed to represent all of these wanderers in the middle string).
Mesê is central to the tone of a lyre — all other strings must be tuned to the middle one, otherwise the tones fall out of place and the sound is off. Yet while I don’t disagree with Mesê is the most important string on the lyre…the boundaries strings I find equally important to ensuring that harmonious center. Most of this poem is built around that central thesis — the concept of Mesê, as both the wanders and the Sun, threading back in forth through synecdoche. As a result, Mesê is referenced directly and indirectly in both poems, a golden threading link, but I wanted to focus on the not-Mesê of it all. Precisely BECAUSE the Delphians divided their cosmos in the way a lyre is divided.
I wanted to do some art that maybe challenges some of our own notions of heliocentrism. Because as a 21st century scholar whose first love was astronomy, I know for certain now what the ancients didn’t — I know that the sun is the center of our wandering system, but that doesn’t mean that the other aspects aren’t important (or don’t have incredible impact towards not only human, but broader organic life).
Also because when it comes to scientific and mathematical consideration of the heavens — some of my favorite ancient thinkers got quite poetic. Take Pythagoras for instance:
Some things he said were expressed symbolically in the manner of the mysteries, and Aristotle has written down a great number of these, like the fact that he called the sea: tear [probably of Kronos], the constellations of the Bears: Rhea’s hands, the Pleiades: the lyre of the Muses, the planets: the dogs of Persephone, and the sound produced by bronze when it is struck: the voice of one of the demons trapped in the bronze.
— Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras 41
With the father of numbers, we see allusions to one of the primary nautical constellations as the “lyre of the Muses”. I have to thank Karen ní Mheallaigh for pointing this one out to me after reading this poem. I had only been thinking of the Pleiades’ constellation in conjunction with that of the Hyades, and the fact that those two make up the Golden Gate of the Ecliptic which all the wanderers would have passed through in antiquity (save for the moon, which is so close to our own wanderer and goes through such variances that it will often eclipse the Golden Gate on both sides, blocking the astral lyre of the Muses from view). This relationship between the moon and the Golden Gate of the Ecliptic was definitely an artistic inspiration for the string I decided to begin with:
Hypatê “High”
(musing tunings)
The first poem (as a body) that comes about are the fixed stars narrating the beginnings of life on Earth, and how that distracts away from their usual fixation on the various stars. I’m nodding to many different voices and rhythms from antiquity in this: playing with epic poetry as well as hymns and meters, acknowledging heliocentrism as focal to many of our formative ideologies, having a birth of a cosmos and some sort of cosmetic order (like the theogonies and cosmogonies of old), as well as trying to challenge some of those “fixed” notions by having the fixed stars becoming fixated on the mutable moon rather than the cardinal sun (to borrow some modal terminology from astrology).
And as a nod to the fact that I’m talking about muses (and in a presentation on tuning), the fixed stars “muse” on tunings (specifically that of the relationship of the moon and the earth’s liquid) and on the birth of tuning as embodied praxis of organic life in our solar system (at least from the human perspective — we have no certainty of other potential organic life forms).
As a classicist, I have a tendency to tune out my own knowledge that I have as a 21st century scholar whose original academic interests were firmly rooted in the sciences — not only astronomy, as I’ve mentioned, but my extremely passionate love for localized marine biology as well, growing up alongside the Salish Sea. However for this piece I decided not to tune them out, but instead to see what I could glean by putting my contemporary knowledge in conversation with the musings around scientific inquiries of the past.
I also like thinking through heights and depths because there’s a tonal joke in the string names on the lyre — Hypatê is the lowest toned string (despite being named “High”) and Ne(ä)tê is the highest toned string (despite being named “Low”). In that vein…
Out of inky electric heights
Twinkly flickering stars of night
Watch the drama down beneath
From their cushy velvet seats
I wanted to begin with a nod to the juxtaposition that the “fixed” stars are only so because they never deviate from their path — they are constantly moving in a manner that allows orientation of our own bodies on earth. But I also wanted to “fix” them as voyeurs to the stage of our own solar system, to highlight their fixation upon our own star.
The messy middle of it all
Making everyone big and small
Undying wanderers through the years
Waltzing ‘round their celestial spheres
The first line is partially a reference to the first piece I published on this very journal: “Stuck in the Middle with M(n)u: An Argument for Greek Consonance in these Existentially Voweled Times” when I first decided to muse on being stuck in the middle (in the wake of a pandemic), and what that truly meant. We are all in the middle in some way or another, and so I wanted to represent the Mesê zone as such. “Big and small” speaks to the mutability of the volatile nascent beginnings of our solar system — our wanderers have gone through quite the process to pull themselves into formation.
I also play mostly in the center strings of my peddle harp — yet my feet have to deal with a lot of mess! I originally started out resting my feet on the two center pedals (B and E) as they wait to jump to other ones to change the tones of the seven different notes, but as I got older and my body changed I started resting them on the outmost pedals of the harp to allow my legs to stretch while I play (D and A). Ironically, I haven’t played my pedal harp in over two years and I actually couldn’t remember for a second which notes were the inner and outer pedals while I was writing this until I moved my feet in all the familiar positions and it instantly came back to me.
Speaking of my feet dancing— my high school orchestra would play winter waltzes at Benaroya Hall in Seattle to help fund our competition trips, which enabled me to play at Chicago Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center as a teenager. While the competition was exhilarating (and traveling sublime) I somehow always preferred doing the waltzes. Perhaps the romantic in me. But there was something between slipping between playing the harp part to a waltz to letting my body be whirled around in those succinct 1–2–3’s that I looked forward to every year.
A star is central — we would know —
And that golden one’s putting on quite the show
Blazing beaming scorching drying
Stretching straining baking lying
Lead wanderer — bright enough to see
That she got the others in harmony
A quip at the heliocentric nature of our solar system and reflecting back on how many years of human thought went into figuring out if our wanderer Earth, or that golden one, was the center of the universe. But also again reiterating the importance the sun has for not only our planet, but the lyre itself — the sun creates the conditions to bake and dry instruments, there’s much stretching and straining to get all the components pulled together, and you usually have to let it lie out in the sun and dry for a while. Not to mention the puns around myth and ideology of lyres and liars.
The iambic rhythm of the middle couplet was heavily influenced by Shel Silverstein, one of the first poets I loved from a young age, and who’s rhyming style I would intensely mimic when I first started writing rhyming poetry. I also add a few references to shells and silver things (which go nicely with oceanic and lunar poetry) as a nod to his influence.
They followed each gilt step she’d tread
Like Ariadne of the golden thread
Leading her chorus through void and plasma
Twirling through all of the cosmic miasma
I reference Ariadne first and foremost because she has a golden thread (and Mesê as the Sun would suggest a golden string) but also to a nod to the dancing floor at Knossos as represented on the Shield of Achilles. And yes, because I did name this journal after her constellation — it’s always been a mediating presence in many different mediums of my art, its own sort of Mesê for my artistic expression, if you will. She also comes at a high spot here, trying to echo the nodes of pleasure in art (where as she shows up in the end of the Neätê fragments to denote the nodes of necessity).
Yet the warming preservation of her brilliant heat
Would take a step back (more than a couple of feet)
To the swooning pas de deux playing out across a triptych
Between gravity and liquid in the sublunary ecliptic —
The first couplet is actually partially a joke — a nod towards the “goldilocks zone” that the earth is in within our solar system, but also I’m focusing on the role of heat with the sun rather than gravity (which is a far more influential factor on say, the big wanderers on the other side of our astroid belt) which I’ve reserved for the moon. The foot and stepping imagery is not only a reference to the dancing, but as a hint that the meter is about to get messed with as the moon begins to take precedence in the stars’ attention. In a sense, the moon effectively tunes things out of the waltzing system that the sun is leading and into a different, much more intimate “swooning pas de deux” (though the waltzing imagery still lingers in the background with “playing out across a triptych”).
The ecliptic here references the place where the two lunar nodes are astronomically located — the points in which it literally eclipses our sun (as it’s doing in the poem at this moment). The lunar nodes in astrology point to past reliance and future growth — both important towards heliocentrism and selenocentrism — not to mention the earlier reference to the Golden Gate of the Ecliptic, which the moon also blocks out.
The bodacious moon had tidally locked onto the swelling sea
Turning their back to take the brunt of all celestial debris
They’re always changing faces, rather fixated on the tide
Til every being on that earth felt liquid rhythm deep inside
We return to iambics to highlight the moon in juxtaposition with the sun’s iambics, but it’s more imprecise and keep dripping into anapests to show how the moon is off kilter from the sun. The assonance and vowels get accentuated so that the moon alters the way in which the text has to be vocally performed. Also the first stanza is bringing in contemporary scientific knowledge — we only ever see one side of our moon because it’s tidally locked onto our planet, and it indeed attracts many meteors and space debris away from hitting us.
The moon technically has a very fixed and stable relationship with our planet, and I wanted to juxtapose that with how it is nevertheless characterized as inconstant by humans because of the moon’s “changing faces” (even though we now know are just changing angled reflections of sunlight). And yet the moon’s rhythms (its gravitational pull) are ones we feel — especially in relation to liquid. I also may be thinking from a human bias in these lyrics — we always feel liquid rhythm in our ears in the form of our heartbeats
They started rolling out of ocean and lapping up the land
They started dribbling down the mountains and seeping through the sand
Now even fixed-fixated stars had queries twinkling up inside:
What did deep sea creatures feel of long-embedded lunar tides?
What impact could solid beings understand beyond their scars?
How could they even fathom what was used to make up stars?
First couplet: I wanted to juxtapose the movements of organic life with the movements of liquids, so there’s verbs that could be used for both (rolling out of, lapping up, dribbling down, seeping through) to highlight the importance of water when it comes to life.
Second couplet: I wanted to reverse the rhyme scheme of the final couplet in the last stanza — with tide(s)/inside — to show the flow of how all these bodies are coming into awareness/consciousness of each other. The fixated moon previously has been staring at the tide, bringing up things deep from the ocean — which then in turn brings up questions deep within the stars themselves as they begin to question this relationship around life that the moon seems to be encouraging. But again, my first awareness of the impact of the moon came through marine biology (which is an interesting perspective of the moon, and other creatures being so attuned to it) and how it necessitated me being in the rhythms of its tidal pull.
Third couplet: A genuine question, historically and scientifically: How did we get past our own intentions and that which was impacted against us to finally understand things like our own impact and what the composition of starlight is? But in those last three lines, I wanted to highlight three aspects of “listening” that I feel are essential to the practice: feeling, understanding, and fathoming (and all the meanings around depth that come with such).
Yet the ocean’s roaring soundscape after billions of years?
Has been the natural music of the lunar tuning spheres.
A step out of rhythm — just off of the sun —
Of water stretching — then rolling back to one —
How do we listen to the past? That was the question I was first asked, and it was a weird one for me to answer — because I was home for the first time due to quarantine next to the Salish Sea, which has a very particular soundscape that I’m familiar with. How old is that soundscape? I think about it historically with the various peoples and tribes that have come to the region in which I was born, but I try to go back even further than that, trying to figure out the formations that brought this aquatic soundscape. Probably because I live in such a wet and drippy corner of the planet.
The second couplet is supposed to mimic the way waves ebb and flow on the shore, to highlight one of the oldest composers of this liquid soundscape.
Now here’s where the understanding gets a little bit tricky —
See, water in actuality is really quite sticky
The moon tunes that stickiness into a form
Eventually changing it into some sort of norm
So while the sun electrified that azure wanderer at its poles
The moon tuned a rhythm into those liquid creatures’ souls.
Water is sticky, I’m not being poetic, that’s just basic chemistry — it’s one of the most adhesive and cohesive non-metallic liquids. And with everything pulling together in that stickiness, I wanted to bring back the reference to electricity from the first line as well to place our star in the role of conductor, for one last symphonic pun to go with tuning.
And here we come to perhaps something close to a conclusion — did the moon tune life into the organisms on earth? Is it one of our most direct and earliest references to musicality? Did it literally call, in the way a chorus leader does, all manner of organic life out of the depths of the sea? Is lunar tuning the primary philosophy of life on our planet?
(I have no idea. But it’s a fun concept to think about, isn’t it?)
Let’s read between the lines
To see the narrative
And try to tease out each
Subtle imperative.An untold story:
How the moon
Got a liar
Into tune.
Figuring out the transition between an epic cosmogony into elegaic fragments was done simply by whittling down two little epodes, but also leaning hard on a pun to make the point. The moon getting a lyre into tune (instead of the sun, or Apollo, or Mesê as the sun, but also the important role of drying when it comes to making stringed instruments) but also getting liars (or humans) into tune (or creating lies into music, musing mythology, making stories and fables out of the rhythms of nature until they become artforms) and into a tune, in the sense of getting them to sing (as the muses are wont to do with the lyrists who are calling out to them for inspiration).
— —
— —
Whispers
Of springtime.
Death in the night.
A song
With too many
Tunes.
— Langston Hughes, “Fragments”
— —
Neätê “Low”
(tuning musings)
As opposed to the stars who muse about the different tunings they’re watching (and synthesizing a sort of philosophy of life) we now take a turn to look at everything happening under the moon’s influence in the sublunary region — it’s different forms (and rhythms and verses and remixes) of musing, and figuring how to get those (and fragments, little scraps of experience) into some sort of working form. So naturally, this is the much more personal half, and it has a lot to do with relationships and dialogues.
Similarly to the Plutarch quote that kicked us off, the boundaries and the center of the lunar phases anchor this piece (the two new moons and the full moon) metrically and in the rhyming pattern. The different phases wax the meanings in the fragments between the moon and the earth and the realms of interpersonal relationships large before waning them back down into the rhythm they started in.
However — special attention has been give to two phases that aren’t the full or new moons. Specifically, my and Forever’s favorite respective phases of the moon: waning crescent and waxing gibbous. Since this half is more explicitly about our personal relationship and because, as I’ve overstated at this point:
(This poem is also a sequel.)
I. New Moon
Take a look without the light
See that void against the height
Even without shining bright
Influential in their flight
Calling for you in the night
Stretching like a gut string tight:
Feel the moon without your sight
I wanted to start with many ancient concepts I was familiar with — seeing without sight, listening without hearing, feeling the resonance of the moon similarly to a gut string being pulled into tune on a lyre.
II. Waxing Crescent
Beach combing
Edge combing
Beach edges
Unbleached edges
Bleached seashells
That she sells
A Salish Salacia sees
A Kentucky Blue Hecatease.
Thinking through rolling out the ocean, as stated previously, but also the formations of liminal spaces and how those are constantly mutable when it comes to the ocean’s edge. The sun and the sea can both bleach things on a beach, and unbleached edges is a fun pun on hair roots. “Salish” and “Kentucky Blue” are both nods to the my and Forever’s birthplaces.
Originally I had silvery instead of Salish — to make a quasi Shel Silverstein pun with shells and to bring out some chromatic imagery with the blue— but I wanted to give a nod to our roots instead.
III. First Quarter
Things breezy cool and blithe
Like a boomeranging scythe
Reality checking out of life
Hilarity of endless strife.
Riding high
Voices low
Dripping bodies
To and fro
Water-watching
Endless flow
Catch an eye
And here we go.
Two bodies slowly coming into tune with each other and juxtaposing a lot of the spectrums of life — chill vibes, flying agricultural/chthonic instruments, utter dissociation with reality, the comedic nature of eternal necessity — then the flow of the verse comes together as the two bodies meet.
IV. Waxing Gibbous
Crack a smile
Mese found
For a while
Common ground
Harmonize
Our own sound
In the lies
Truth abound
Fine tuning
A tune divine
Takes time.
Fine.
The rhythm and rhyming pattern continues from the last fragment to show the two bodies coming more in tune as we build up to the full moon. Mesê gets its only explicit nod before the end at this point, as it is Forever’s favorite phase. Also fine tuning a tune divine DOES take time — and sometimes you need time more than you need a muse. Even with divine tuning.
V. Full Moon
So sick of Nietzschean tantric
From those earnest sychophantics
(Veil of Isis, how Romantic)
Just performin’ cuz they frantic
Thinkin ‘bout our mid-Atlantics
(plus more suicidal antics)
When they’d rather be pedantic
Than to feel out the semantics
(Apollonian hierophantics)
Chemically making you bacchantic
Towards the shades of Negromantic
(Flowing through-Nch’i-Wàna-and-Styx — )
This is where the poem waxes brightest and gets the most intense so it definitely takes some breaking down. It’s similar to the New Moons, though the iambic meter gets way more intense (as you would expect from new moon to full moon) and a lot more ideas and feelings start popping out as a result.
First triplet — this is basically a summary of my entire sophomore year of undergrad (the year I met Forever) when I was studying music in a year long program on Romanticism and I deeply and profoundly disagreed with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (though found his Case of Wagner utterly delightful), which ended up making me tip back into the field of classics to study mythology and tragedy. Specifically I disagreed with his assessments of Apollo and Dionysus, but realized that I probably didn’t know enough about myth and tragedy to justify feeling that way.
(Now knowing far more about myth and tragedy…yeah, I still feel that way.)
Second triplet — I generally think we spend a lot of our lives doing different forms of anxious performance physically because psychologically…well it can be a lot. Also there has been a lot of performance this year of certain demographics truly having to comprehend the ramifications of the transatlantic slave trade (and I’m not even sure if “comprehend” is the right word here — it all feels very surface) which tends to obfuscate the real impacts of intergenerational trauma — and how in many ways that can lead to (or even necessitate) suicidal ideation: internally, externally, and eternally.
Third triplet — a tendency to prioritize the head over the feelings (and the semantics). One of the working titles of this poem for a while was “XXII. The Star & XXIII. The Moon” after the tarot cards (as another way of thinking through meanings of stars and moons and meanings and canons) and so “hierophantics” was also originally a quasi-tarot nod, but also throwing in Apollo to juxtapose with “bacchantic” in the next line to bring it back to my Nietzschean critique.
Fourth triplet — I knew that the Full Moon had to end in a cut-off because otherwise the idea is supposed to be that if it isn’t and pulled back, it would take over the tuning (and the ending refrain has just started to alter and change). And our narrator is trying to break out of this with her moon in a new direction, away from Romanticism towards Negromanticism, which is a reference to the artistic movement that Forever and I have created and been dabbling in for the past year. An art movement that looks to the past and what it means to be a shade of society (in all punned forms of that term). Kind of like the Italian negromanzia in a way. Or, as June would say:
“I am not alive nor dead nor gray nor anything absolute but I am black. […] Brown may mean negro. Negro may mean nothing. I am in the middle of delusion. I am in the way of nothing. But I am in the way.”
Originally I had “flowing through Columbia and Styx — ” as a nod to the Columbia River, the largest river in Washington State (and a nod to the fact that I had just been taken away from my moon by the institution of Columbia University) but in the essence of “listening to the past”, the river has comparably been called the Columbia for very little time, and if I wanted to put it in conversation with the River Styx from mythology which is the river which all souls must cross in the underworld, then I should probably call it by one of its older names, so Nch’i-Wàna was the most common names I could find for that river in the Tlingit dialect. It also makes the elision fit in better — from “through” to “Styx” every word is supposed to elide to show it’s flowing into one before things pull back.
Also having the four triplets completes the dance of a waltz.
VI. Waning Gibbous
Loosen the string
It’s too sharp
You need it lower
On this harp.Tighten back up —
Annnnd it’s flat.
But notice how
It makes a scat.
Pulling back from the full moon’s intensity we return to musical metaphor. Things can become too entangled, too confusing, too seen up close, and that’s when things get sharp or fall flat — but that’s also a whole other part of the tuning process. To echo the boundaries strings again, I’m playing with reversed ideas of lowness, tightening, loosening, and notions of sharp and flat.
It’s also a nod to the fact that I definitely would have dropped out of the field of classics in NYC if I hadn’t been able to ground myself in the jazz scene around my campus and Harlem.
VII. Last Quarter
The sea ain’t got its own back door
Say what you are, and nothing more
Soak it up in every pore
Always know what you’re here for.
Whereas First Quarter is two bodies coming together, Last Quarter is supposed to echo a parting farewell before two bodies are inevitably separating.
“The sea ain’t got its own back door” is a phrase in the Black community that I heard for the first time in a long long while this summer at a lecture from Rinaldo Walcott: “The Black Atlantic: On Water, Art, and Black Movement.” I watched the talk when I was right in the middle of the composing these fragments and I came up with this rhyme before he had finished. It references the fact that Black people are often hyper-vigilant and keeping an eye out for the back door in most scenarios in life — yet the sea doesn’t have one, which is something we often need to remember.
I’m not sure what the future will hold, what shifts are on the horizon in this year around three to the thirds, whether Saturn (or Kronos) returning astrologically is even affecting what I feel — but to remix some West Side Story from the northwest end of Manhattan:
The air is humming
And something vague is coming
But I also wanted to stress allowing liquid into yourself as a form of knowledge, of listening, of knowing. Which seems entirely counterfactual to a lyre or liar, yet here we are.
VIII. Waning Crescent
Words dripping
Slipping
Back and forth
Drenching
Clenching
South and north
Tuning
Luning
Mooning
Crooning
Spooning lumps of sugar sphinx
Into capitalist subtle-tea
Trying to feel out and fathom together
Just what’ll be.
The two-faced creative blind-spot of memory
Like Ariadne embedded in Naxos emery
Words, liquids, people, emotions, are all fluid.
There’s a casual reference to Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety: or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant” because it echoes in my mind resonances with both the lyrical “bleached seashells that she sells” in Waxing Crescent as well as the “Veil of Isis” in Full Moon — but also all the consumptive sickly sweet aspects of capitalism and ideology might be starting to trickle out of my brain like sugar out of a sieve.
Then bringing it back to Ariadne — myth is beautiful and abrasive, like the golden thread, like the nature of emery as a material (primarily found on Naxos, the island on which Ariadne was abandoned, which led to some of her own suicidal antics). We’ve always known that myth is dazzling and devastating. And now both sides are represented. We can finally close onto a Mese.
IX. New Moon (again).
Know now through these last epodes
Fixed, mutable, card’nal modes
Humming down the starlit roads
Bearing dripping liquid lodes
Ever-braided with our codes
Uttered first in ancient odes:
Tuning’s born of lunar nodes.
This was the first poem that I wrote of all the lyric fragments. Endings (artistically at least) are often the easiest for me. Though it’s also an echo, or another part of the cycle — it’s the new moon again. “Braided in our codes” to bring it back to science but also the hair imagery started in the Waxing Crescent. And “uttered first in ancient odes” to bring it back to attempting to listen to the past, and the ancient performer who helped kick off my performative poetry in the first place.
Mesê “Middle”
(amused and attuned — a gold or silver string?)
I’m not literally arguing that Mesê might be a gold or silver string, more I’m trying to problematize the heliocentric nature of the ancient lyre and maybe give another read using the cosmos and the moon — but also emphasizing listening as embodied understanding. The first half of this poem was symphony, the second half empathy — perhaps together we got somewhere towards that cosmetic and cosmic sympathy that so many ancients (and the very person who brought me to the panel in the first place) were concerned with.
Sappho says…
The stars around their blooming moon
Slip back their luminescing form whenever
In her fullness her light pours forth on
The earth(silvery)
So back to this being a sequel. It’s not entirely evident even to folks who are in the known until you get to this Sappho quote at the end. But I wanted to leave it with a lyrist who is in tune with the moon and the ways in which it affects at least that one little liquid body with her strange dried out mellifluous little instrument. Sappho is a voice I have been listening to for over half my life now — I first read that poem in translation when I was 12.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Sappho after all these years, it’s that she understands the interpersonal. She gets how relationships can be an entire cosmos in microcosm. She lives and breathes cosmeticism in all manners — internally, externally, and eternally. And that finds resonance with other poets and performers over thousands of years.
To close, I wanted to leave it with a poem from that tangled 19th century that I’m still trying to extricate my artistic notions from, but before that I wanted to find some resonance with Sappho in another poem that I love, from a poet who I feel echoes many of the styles in Sappho (but in full lustrous poems that we still have, rather than a collection of fragments) to illustrate how the cosmos can also be the building blocks of a relationship.
Or…
A brown jouissance June
Crooning a queer tune
For her Angelaic Moon:
Outside tonight the moon is not a fantasy
At last again the moon moves full and dark
with color in the universe
where nothing terrifies the truth
where light is known as energy
and cherished
Too many many days and nights
have choked back
unlit paralyzed and tortured clockwork
regulating savagely against
the heartbeat of the prisoner
The heavies poised themselves on fat feet
running backwards after her
the one they named The Number One
They have taken away the woman who loved the people.
They have hunted the moon in its honesty.
They think they have captured the moon in a closet.
But
children know that the moon is used to the night.
She has returned.
And now we can see more clearly
the prisoners of this electrified hell
And now we can see more clearly
ourselves
in the teachings of darkness
that liberate the beauty of the moon.
— June Jordan, “Poem for Angela”
Dear friend, far off, my lost desire
So far, so near in woe and weal
O loved the most, when most I feel
There is a lower and a higher
Known and unknown; human divine
Sweet human hand and lips and eye
Dear heavenly friend that canst not die
Mine, mine, for ever, ever mine
Strange friend, past, present, and to be
Loved deeplier, darklier understood
Behold, I dream a dream of good
And mingle all the world with thee.
Tennyson, “In Memoriam: CXXIX”
